He would win her from cynicism and isolation, would melt her frozen nature in the genial atmosphere of his pure and constant affection, and interweave her aimless, sombre life with the busy, silvery web of his own.
After forty years, God would grant him home, and wife, and hearthstone peace.
What a flush and sparkle stole to this grave man’s olive cheek, and calm, deep blue eyes!
Ah! how hungrily he longed for the touch of her hand, the sight of her face; and, snatching his hat, he put the paper in his pocket, and hurried towards “Solitude.”
In the holy hush of that hazy autumnal afternoon, nature—Magna Mater,—
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“The altar-curtains of whose hills Are sunset’s purple air,” “Who dips in the dim light of setting suns The spacious skirts of that vast robe of hers That widens ever in the wondrous west,” |
seemed slumbering and dreaming away the day.
The forests were gaudy in their painted shrouds of scarlet and yellow leaves, and long, feathery flakes of purple bloom nodded over crimson berries, emerald mosses, and golden-hearted asters.
Only a few weeks previous, Dr. Grey had driven along that road, and, while the echo of harvest hymns rang on the hay-scented air, had asked himself how men and women could become so completely absorbed in temporal things, ignoring the solemn and indisputable fact of the brevity of human life and the restricted dominion of man,—
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“Whose part in all the pomp that fills The circuit of the summer hills Is, that his grave is green.” |